TWU faculty discuss laptop use in class

Posted by admin on Mar 23, 2010 in News | 1 comment

On March 11th, a one-time faculty workshop was held at TWU to discuss the use of laptops in classrooms.

Bill Strom, communications professor and associate director of faculty developments, was asked by the provost to think of topics and offer seminars for faculty to become better teachers and researchers.

“There has been discussion about how laptops have become a fact of our existence and how they are sometimes very helpful and sometimes very detrimental,” said Strom. “Usually what our seminars do is not preach a certain answer. We just like to get lots of information out on the table and faculty can look at it and debate and tell their stories…[then] make their own decisions.”
What came out of the seminar were arguments that came from both sides of the issue; it was also not a policy discussion.

“Those who said we have the right and responsibility to ban computer use in some classes in order to guarantee that students can really engage material. On the other side was, that’s not our role and there is not great benefit to banning, in fact banning is negative. We should rather embrace technology and use it the best we can to engage students,” said Strom.

What do students think about this topic?

“Everyone I see is using laptops, they may be taking notes but there’s always something on the side,” said Chimdi Nwosu, an applied mathematics and computing science student at TWU. “I’d rather take notes; I learn better that way.”

“I think, depending on the class that you’re in, if I were in a math class I wouldn’t use my laptop, but I know students who can only learn on their laptops. Maybe they could implement a policy for no Internet in classrooms,” said Samantha Selvin, a business student at TWU.

The main speaker of the seminar who has banned laptops in one of their introductory level courses is David Jeffery, a linguistics professor at TWU.

For Jeffery, pedagogy, a class survey on the issue, lessen distractions, inequality and respect issues were the reasons for banning laptops in his LING 210 class.
Strom also mentioned that several other professors have banned laptops in their classes.